Attributed Based Access Control (ABAC) for Web Services

  • Authors:
  • Eric Yuan;Jin Tong

  • Affiliations:
  • Booz Allen Hamilton, Inc.;Booz Allen Hamilton, Inc.

  • Venue:
  • ICWS '05 Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Web Services
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

For companies and government agencies alike, the emergence ofWeb services technologies and the evolution of distributed systemstoward Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) have helped promote collaboration and information sharing by breaking down "stove-piped"systems and connecting them via loosely coupled, interoperablesystem-to-system interfaces. Such architectures, however, also bring about their own security challenges that require due consideration. Unfortunately, the current information security mechanisms are insufficientto address thesechallenges. In particular, the access control models today are mostly static and coarsely grained; they are not well-suitedfor the service-oriented environments where information access isdynamic and ad-hoc in nature. This paper outlines the access control challenges for Web services and SOA, and proposes an Attribute BasedAccess Control (ABAC) model as a new approach, which is based onsubject, object, and environment attributes and supports both mandatory and discretionary access control needs. The paper describes the ABAC model in terms of its authorizationarchitecture and policy formulation, and makes a detailed comparison between ABAC and traditional role-based models, which clearly showsthe advantages of ABAC. The paper then describes how this newmodel can be applied to securing web service invocations, with animplementation based on standard protocols and open-source tools.The paper concludes with a summary of the ABAC modelýs benefits and some future directions.